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By Root 466 0

was in excellent physical condition. Photographs of the era show a compact, muscular young man, with thick, dark hair and the slightly swaggering expression common to fighter aces, test pilots, and other alpha males of the airborne community. Pronounced fit for duty, Jones made his way to a tiny cantina, where cooks had prepared a high-protein meal of steak and eggs to sustain his stomach during his nine-hour mission. While he ate, a CIA supervisor went over the flight plan one last time and waited for the coded go-ahead message from Washington.

• • •

With the time difference, it was 6:00 PM on August 27 in the District of Columbia, and the afternoon rush hour was just beginning. Richard Bissell sat in his downtown office on H Street, across from the Metropolitan Club, and waited for Allen Dulles to call with the mission’s final authorization. Spread out on his desk was a map of Soviet central Asia with the rough geographic bearings of the Tyura-Tam ICBM test site, the latest weather reports indicating clear skies over Kazakhstan, and a copy of Jones’s flight plan.

Jones did not know that he worked for Bissell, though some U-2 pilots would later reveal that they had heard rumors that their orders came from a “Mister B in Washington.” Nor did the lawyers and ordinary business executives who worked in the suites next to Bissell’s office in the Matomic Building realize that their tall, avuncular neighbor with the round-rimmed glasses and easy smile ran the CIA’s most ambitious and classified program. Such was the secrecy surrounding Bissell’s operation that to maximize security, the U-2 reconnaissance program was housed separately from the agency’s main headquarters near the Lincoln Memorial.

The U-2 had grown out of the same 1954 Killian report that had warned Eisenhower of Soviet missile gains and recommended that the United States fast-track its Atlas ICBM program to keep pace. “We must find ways,” the report had also stated, “to increase the number of hard facts upon which our intelligence estimates are based . . . and to reduce the danger of gross overestimation or gross underestimation of the threat.” There was a virtual information blackout on the Soviet Union, as the bomber gap would amply demonstrate, and new technologies had to be harnessed to collect more accurate data about Russian intentions. Specific recommendations were made in a separate, more classified report, which was circulated within a narrower audience at the National Security Council. It had been prepared by Edwin Land, a flamboyant Harvard dropout whose Jewish grandparents had emigrated from the very same part of Odessa where Korolev had grown up. Land had founded the Polaroid Company and was known for his “spellbinding performances” at Polaroid annual stockholders meetings, where he wooed investors like “a Broadway star.”

The United States, Land urged in his corollary report, had to begin the immediate development of two different types of high-altitude photo-reconnaissance platforms. The first of these, the construction of a state-of-the-art surveillance plane, was approved by Eisenhower in late 1954; the second, a technologically more complex option that involved outer space, struck some at the time as the stuff of science fiction. It was put on the back burner.

At the CIA, the forty-five-year-old Bissell was put in charge of the spy plane project. A Groton and Yale man, and an amateur ornithologist with the right WASP connections, Bissell hailed from a prominent Connecticut family with interests in the insurance and railroad industries. He had grown up in the famous Mark Twain House—the rambling Victorian mansion that Samuel Clemens had built with his literary proceeds—and he had summered aboard his family’s string of ever larger yachts, fostering a lifelong love of the sea. Trained as an economist, Bissell had presided over some of the financial aid programs disbursed in Europe after the war under the Marshall Plan, earning a reputation as a good planner with a disdain for convention and bureaucracy. Like Medaris, he possessed a rebellious